Wednesday, June 30, 2004

That's the question I asked myself after reading Art Caplan's piece in Newsday today. Art tells the tale of the recent meeting in Denver of the American Society of Concierge Physicians: "Concierge medicine is a special, high-end form of medical care that guarantees that if you need treatment you will get it, without a hassle, seven days a week-but only for an extra fee. If you can pay amounts

As previously noted, this is generating a lot of interest on the part of the press, NYS Att'y Gen'l Eliot Spitzer, and others. (Kaiser Foundation's web page has a good summary of the various strands of this issue.) Now the drug industry's trade association, PhRMA, has revised its principles on the subject, according a story in today's Wall Street Journal (requires paid subscription). Click for

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

As reported in today's "Daily Dose" from Modern Healthcare: "Florida banned specialty hospitals aimed at a single condition and eliminated its certificate-of-need law for new adult open-heart surgery and angioplasty programs at general hospitals. The law, signed yesterday by Gov. Jeb Bush, also exempts from CON the addition of beds to existing structures, but a CON is still required for new

Here's a page of good background materials on charity care and tax-exempt status generally, some policy considerations from Nancy Kane at Harvard's School of Public Health, and some local insights into Champaign County's decision to revoke the tax-exempt status of Provena Covenant Medical Center. After diligently scouring the Web, I have come up empty-handed in my search for a copy of the

The Kaiser Family Foundation's website has a good summary of the WSJ journal article mentioned below. The Champaign County Board of Review's decision is here. I'll get a link to the Illinois Department of Revenue's decision as soon as I can find it.

The big news before the recent rash of hearings into and lawsuits against tax-exempts was the decision by Illinois' Department of Revenue affirming the Champaign County Board of Review's determination that the Provena Covenant Medical Center in Urbana was not sufficiently charitable in its operations and no longer deserved to be exempt from local property taxes. The saga is described today in a

Monday, June 28, 2004

Bob Herbert, in his column in today's N.Y. Times, with a substantial assist from the research of Dr. Barbara Starfield at Johns Hopkins, documents the comparative rankings of this country's health outcomes (e.g., low birth weight percentages, neonatal mortality, infant mortality, life expectancy at age 1 and at age 15):"Of 13 countries in a recent comparison, the United States ranks an average of

Sunday, June 27, 2004

It's an old and familiar story for anyone with any experience as a physician, pharmacist, hospital exec, patient, or patient's parent or spouse. (Have I left out anyone?) Routine, 2-hour surgery is billed at $25,652.14, with 4-figure charges for mysteriously named items, astronomical pricing codes for everyday items (the medical equivalent of the Defense Department's $700 hammer), and plain old

As reported in today's N.Y. Times (requires paid subscription), Schering-Plough's been sending 5- and 6-figure checks, unbidden, to physicians "in exchange for an attached 'consulting' agreement that required nothing other than his commitment to prescribe the company's medicines." (Kind of makes you nostalgic for the days when they thought they could buy the loyalty of physicians for the price of

William Jewell College, according to a recent AP story (via the Lawrence (KS) Journal-World), has added a bioethics major. Two features of the story seem especially noteworthy:Kansas City planners see the major as an important phase in the emergence of KC as a biomedical research center: "The major will include study in biology, chemistry, and religion and philosophy, and it's being introduced

Friday, June 25, 2004

N.Y. Times op-editorialist Bob Herbert has followed up on last Monday's column with another swipe at those who claim that soaring med mal insurance premiums are the result of massive incrases in med mal payouts. This time, though, it's the AMA who gets rapped for feeding the frenzy. Claiming that 20 states are now in a med-mal insurance crisis (up from 12 in 2002), the AMA has conveniently

Thursday, June 24, 2004

The Dallas Morning News' Sherry Jacobson has been doing a fine job in two recent pieces (6/23, 6/24) covering Parkland's financial woes. Bottom line: Parkland's caught in The Big Squeeze: Federal law requires the hospital to provide emergency medical care to anyone who needs it, regardless of their county (our country) of residence. But state law requires other counties to reimburse Dallas only

The Wall Street Journal ran a good article (subscription required) Thursday on the difficult choices faces by hospital administrators when uninsured patients rack up hefty bills: Who should get a discount? And how much of the bill should be written off? Uninsured patients come in all shapes and sizes, and hospital policies are only a starting point for making the hard choices posed by uninsured

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

I particularly recommend a recent (June 22) publication by the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation entitled "Description of Present Law Relating to Charitable and Other Exempt Organizations and Statistical Information Regarding Growth and Oversight of the Tax-Exempt Sector." It's a good overview of the tax-exempt industry and horn-book style overview of the legal basics.

There's a lot of scrutiny of tax-exempt organizations these days, much of it on the health care industry, and all of it of potential significance to tax-exempt health care providers. Here's a quick run-down of yesterday's developments:Richard Scruggs announced yesterday that he (or related firms) has filed 5 more class-action suits against 8 more defendants challenging the amount of charity care

Tuesday, June 22, 2004

More suits were filed today against some health care giants, including Catholic Health Initiative and Baylor Health Care System. Here's a more stable link to the web page where the pleadings can be found: http://www.nfplitigation.com/NotForProfit/disclaimer.aspx.

Monday, June 21, 2004

While I pondered how to blog this topic efficiently, along came the folks at Kaiser Family Foundation with a characteristically terrific summary of three recent newspaper reports on this important topic. If NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is right about this, GlaxoSmithKline's decision to withhold negative research results about the side effect of the antidepressant Paxil in children "the . .

As expected, the Supreme Court today decided that ERISA does, in fact, preempt the tort-like cause of action created by the Texas legislature in the Texas Health Care Liability Act, at least as against HMO's providing health care coverage through an employer. Indeed, the cause of action is completely preempted (§ 502(a)(1)(B)), so ERISA not only provides a defense, it also creates a basis for

Sunday, June 20, 2004

It sounds like the old rap on living wills is being recycled. According to an article in the June 21 Newsday, experts are weighing in on the disutility of living wills. The old rap: (1) Writers of living wills have a hard time predicting with any precision the diagnosis and treatment options that will be their actual end-of-life reality, and so the document has almost no chance of addressing

Bob Herbert nails the problem with med mal reform in the last third of an 800-word column that will appear in this morning's (6/21) N.Y. Times: [T]he problem when it comes to malpractice is not the amount of money the insurance companies are making (they're doing fine) or the rates the doctors have to pay, but rather the terrible physical and emotional damage that is done to so many unsuspecting

I've written about boutique medicine elsewhere (5Aug03, 14Aug03) - the practice by which a physician or group will charge an annual premium in return for which they will promise to return calls promptly, not keep the patient waiting in the waiting room, and generally provide the quality of care dinosaurs like me remember from the '50's. Today's N.Y. Times has an interesting opinion piece on the

Good article in today's N.Y. Times on testing for fetal defects. The ethical issue is an interesting one, succinctly described in the article this way:The wider range and earlier timing of prenatal tests are raising concern among some bioethicists and advocates for disability rights who argue that the medical establishment is sending a message to patients that the goal is to guard against the

Saturday, June 19, 2004

Well, as a teacher of bioethics at a Methodist school with a Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility, the debate over whether ethics has any place in a higher education curriculum is, to put it mildly, more than mildly interesting. The debate is set out well in Saturday's "Beliefs" column by Peter Steinfels in The New York Times.

As reported in today's Washington Post, a task force of the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont issued a report on June 8 setting out the guidelines for ceremonies that recognize same-sex civil unions. The document itself includes a thoughtful analysis of the scriptural and theological underpinnings of the blessing of same-sex relationships. Vermont isn't the only diocese to take this step, but it is

The complaints in the NFP/charity-care cases mentioned here Thursday are here. [Update: that link now prompts you for a password. This link is better; it will take you to a home page that leads to the pleadings.] It looks as though the plan is for all litigation documents to be posted on this web site.

Friday, June 18, 2004

Alice Dembner reports in today's Business section of The Boston Globe that Harvard University and Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital "will pay $2.4 million to settle allegations that they misused four federal research and training grants, improperly billing the government for salaries and expenses, the US attorney's office said yesterday." Universities and teaching hospitals around the country need

Thursday, June 17, 2004

UPI has filed a story based upon an earlier Wall Street Journal report (requires paid subscription) about a series of suits -- with more to come -- against nonprofit hospitals:Richard Scruggs, the Mississippi lawyer whose legal attack on the tobacco industry helped bring about historic changes -- and multibillion-dollar settlements -- is setting his sights on not-for-profit hospitals which he

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

In a late-afternoon report today, Modern Healthcare's Mark Taylor wrote that "the American Hospital Association delivered a 17-page letter to the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department's antitrust division rejecting hospital consolidation as a key driver of healthcare costs and pleading for a review of health insurers' conduct. The AHA's letter anticipates the expected release this

Monday, June 14, 2004

I discussed this resolution here last week, and today the N.Y. Times reports that the resolution filed by Dr. J. Chris Hawk III "drew an angry response from colleagues on Sunday at the annual meeting of the association. Many doctors stood up to denounce the resolution in passionate speeches - even after its sponsor . . . asked that it be withdrawn."

Sunday, June 13, 2004

Today's Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call has a long, well-written article on medical futility. The author, Ann Wlazelek notes that a national turnabout in medical ethics, one in which doctors no longer want to employ all that medical science has to offer to keep patients alive and families find themselves fighting for their loved ones' right to live.

It's a shift in thinking that evolved in the

Saturday, June 12, 2004

Michael Douglas' ex-wife, Diandra, moves in with Zack Hamton Bacon III, a New York hedge-fund executive. When they try to have kids by IVF and failed, they tried a surrogate, and that failed, as well. (It's unclear whether the IVF attempts and the surrogacy attempt are the result of an infertility problem with one of the prospective parents or is simply a matter of preference. Both Diandra and

Friday, June 11, 2004

Today's Wall Street Journal has a report (requires subscription) on the case against Alvorado Hospital Medical Center and its former CEO, Barry Weinbaum. Prosecutors charge that the recruitment deal that lured physicians to the hospital constituted illegal remuneration in violation of 42 USC § 1320a-7b(b), which makes it a crime to pay "any remuneration (including any kickback, bribe, or rebate)

St. David's can rest easy, finally. After an epic struggle with the federal government, St. David's Hospital in Austin can bank on a March 2004 jury verdict, which held that the hospital retained sufficient control after its partnership with HCA that it could remain tax-exempt. According to an item in today's Daily Dose, the U.S. won't appeal the trial court judgment (although it did file a

Thursday, June 10, 2004

Good article in today's N.Y. Times about the ethics of physician involvement in executions. Here's the crux of the problem:About 25 states allow or require doctors to be present at executions. But information on the number of doctors who participate in executions is hard to come by, as states generally refuse to name anyone who does so, citing security and privacy concerns. . . .

NPR's Morning Edition today ran a segment it describes this way:A South Carolina doctor is asking the American Medical Association to approve as ethical a policy that would permit doctors to refuse treating medical malpractice lawyers. The proposal demonstrates how heated the debate over medical malpractice has become. At 4 minutes and 2 seconds, it's well worth a listen. When the transcript

What are the chances that the holder of the poetry chair at Oxford's latest poetical exegesis would land in 13th place on the Amazon.com bestseller list based on pre-publication sales alone? Pretty good, apparently, if the book gets hyped on page one of The New York Times. Less than 24 hours ago, it was at 109 (and that was a few hours after the Times article hit, so it was probably already

Wednesday, June 9, 2004

Today's Philadelphia Inquirer has a good piece about drug studies that are tubed by the drug companies that sponsor them. Here's the set-up:A doctor is thinking of trying a new drug on a 67-year-old patient because a study shows it works well in men only slightly younger. But the doctor doesn't know about a clinical trial that found serious side effects in older patients. Those results were

When I put up the message below (less than 3 hours ago), Ricks' book on Dylan was ranked 109. Right now, it's ranked 28. The power of the press, indeed. I wonder what it was ranked yesterday at this time (before the Times piece hit the Web). . . .

Christopher Ricks, professor of humanities at Boston University and the newly minted Professor of Poetry at Oxford, has a thing for Bob Dylan, and has published a 500-page tome, "Dylan's Visions of Sin" (Ecco Press), in support of the claim that Dylan is a master poet, according to an article in today's N.Y. Times. The Amazon.com sales rank for this book, which will be officially released on

There was an interesting piece in yesterday's The Christian Science Monitor on international organ sales. Between this article and the lengthy one in the N.Y. Times Magazine on May 23, this topic is getting a lot of attention these days. Is the U.S. policy against organ sales eventually doomed?

Tuesday, June 8, 2004

Does Harvard's Michael E. Porter have the right idea for reforming the health care system? You can sample his ideas in this story from today's Boston Globe. It summarizes an 18-page piece ("Fixing Competition in U.S. Health Care (HBR Research Report)" by Porter and Elizabeth Olmstead Teisberg) in the June issue of The Harvard Business Review. Here's HBR's description of the piece:The U.S.

In today's Federal Register we have the latest addition to the growing body of "compliance guidance" from the Office of Inspector General, this time in the form of changes to the previously published hospital compliance guidance (63 Fed. Reg. 8987 (February 23, 1998)). All of the OIG compliance guidance documents are collected here.

While doctors can prescribe drugs for any use, the promotion of drugs for these so-called "off-label uses" is prohibited. The FDA's guidance in this area is relatively clear, although the agency has been somewhat constrained by a federal district court (Washington Legal Foundation v. Friedman (requires WestLaw subscription)). So it was a big deal when Pfizer admitted in a Boston case yesterday

Monday, June 7, 2004

As reported in today's Daily Dose, Pediatrics has published an article (link is to abstract only) that estimates thousands of pediatric patients die each year due to medical error:Thousands of children die unnecessarily in hospitals because of medical errors stemming from patient-safety lapses, and the extra cost of care for pediatric patients exposed to 20 types of safety problems exceeds $1

In its Saturday issue, The Washington Post ran an article by Ceci Connolly on the Kerry health plan. In the "we've heard this before" category, the plan seeks to obtain health-care savings (and therefore reduced premiums, and therefore more coverage for the working uninsured) through electronic medical records and disease-management requirements. The plan would also position the federal

Stateline.org has published a very helpful summary (updated June 4) of pending legislation, including constitutional amendments, from around the various states. Stateline.org says it "is a non-partisan, non-profit online news publication that reports each weekday on state government. Funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts it was created in 1999 to strengthen and enrich U.S. political journalism by

Friday, June 4, 2004

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott issued an AG Opinion on indigent health care yesterday. It seems the Amarillo Hospital District sold its hospital, Northwest Texas Hospital, to Universal Health Systems of Amarillo, Inc., in 1996. UHS acquired, along with the hospital, the county's indigent-care obligations pursuant to Chapter 61 of the Health and Safety Act. Since then, UHS has noticed that

The 2nd District Court of Appeal has approved Michael Schiavo's request that Jeb Bush's appeal go directly to the Supreme Court, which allows the litigants to bypass the intermediate appellate stage in the dispute over the validity of "Terri's Law," according to an article in the Tallahassee Democrat. Thanks to Kathy Cerminara for the heads up on this.

Meanwhile, Terri's parents are again

Wednesday, June 2, 2004

If the Administration and Congress were serious about having a law that would pass constitutional muster, Pub. L. No. 108-105 needs only two simple changes. First, make it clear that the prohibition does not apply to any procedure that is performed before the fetus is viable. Second, include an exception so that the prohibition doesn't apply when it is necessary to protect the health of the

Health Affairs' May/June issue has an interesting article that show that workforce characteristics are a bigger influence on health care coverage rates than state health policies. Here's the journal's press release and summary:Working In Communities With Greater Number Of ‘Advantaged’ WorkersIncreases Likelihood Of Employer-Sponsored Coverage BETHESDA, MD — Although there is wide variation

Liberals touting states' rights. Conservatives pooh-poohing individual liberty and freedom. The are just some of the political side-effects of the debate over physician-assisted suicide in the wake of the 9th Circuit's opinion last week telling the Justice Department (and John Ashcroft personally) to take a hike and leave Oregonians and their Death With Dignity Act alone. Today's on-line Wall

Tuesday, June 1, 2004

The New York Times has a series of articles today about the reality of living and dying under Oregon's physician-assisted suicide law. The lead article is here. There is also a multimedia presentation on the voices of the terminally ill, which links off the main story page, and a brief story (with photos) of a woman who invited her friends in to experience her death together.

1. The partial-birth abortion law is unconstitutional in three respects. a. The statutory definition of the procedure could apply to previability D&E procedures as well as inductions. It could also apply to the interventions performed by physicians who treat a woman experiencing a spontaneous second-trimester

At 9:00am this morning, Federal District Judge Phyllis Hamilton issued a 117-page order permanently enjoining the enforcement of the federal partial-birth abortion law. The order is here (PDF); the statute may be viewed here.

As reported this morning by the San Francisco Chronicle:The ruling applies to the nation's 900 or so Planned Parenthood clinics and their doctors, who perform roughly